College basketball fans might be in the midst of March Madness, but when it comes to politics, being mad is in season year round. Today, we offer some analysis of outrage in the U.S.

ARE YOU MORE ANGRY?

RAGE IS CONTAGIOUS

A Pew Research Center analysis of Facebook posts and press releases from the official accounts of Congress members found that posts with statements of annoyance, resentment or anger greatly increased from 2015 to 2016.
The posts defined as indignant disagreement were about 10 percent of the total posts.

MADNESS SPREADS FASTER

The Pew study of congressional social media posts is a small sample size compared with 70 million posts analyzed by Chinese researchers at Beighang University in Beijing. The analysis was published by Cornell University in 2013. The results were similar in both reports – anger is more influential than joy.

The Chinese scientists analyzed posts on Weibo, their country’s version of Twitter. Weibo grew to 500 million users in China from 2009 to 2013. The scientists used a data set of 70 million tweets from 200,000 users. The study claims that anger is more influential than other emotions like joy, which indicates that the angry tweets can spread quickly and broadly in a network.

MEASURED REACTIONS

Anger might spread faster and get more reaction, but love is more popular, at least on Facebook. It’s been just over a year since Facebook and its 1.8 billion users began using emojis. Facebook announced this month that in the first year the reactions have been used more than 300 billion times, and the most popular new emoji was love.

What the world needs now:
The social media-tracking company Quintly tracked 130,000 Facebook posts in April 2016. The like button had the highest percentage of use, 76.4 percent. Here’s a breakdown of the other emojis’ use:

Emojitracker.com launched July 4, 2013. The site calculates emoji use on Twitter in real time. As of 1 p.m. Friday, the tracker had counted 18.4 billion emojis used. The two used the most were tears of joy and the heart sign. The pouting face, mostly used for anger, was 60th.

DEALING WITH IT

Teenagers might experience anger, fury and rage on a regular basis. A Gallup survey of teens 13-17 regarding how they deal with their anger might be helpful for those involved in conflict at any age. Here are the leading responses for girls and boys to the question, “What do you do most often to deal with your anger?”

According to the federal charges, Russian operatives spread pro-Trump and anti-Clinton propaganda. They posed as Americans to coordinate and infiltrate political activities. They organized grass roots rallies. They paid for a cage large enough to hold an actress impersonating Clinton in a prison uniform.

The indictment shows a concerted years-long effort by a group dedicated to undermining the American political system. It shows the scale of that effort, eventually involving 80 staff in St. Petersburg, a budget of more than a million dollars a month, hundreds of social media accounts, stolen identities of American citizens – and even visits into the United States by...